Migrants unite for better trailer park living

In the five years
Pasquala Beaza has lived in a squalid trailer park for migrant
farmworkers, she has endured the stench of sewage overflows, street
flooding and blackouts.

When temperatures soared to 115 degrees in
the baking Coachella Valley and an electrical fire killed the power for
a month, her family couldn't take any more.

Beaza's husband and four other residents sued their landlords in state court.

In
doing so, they joined a small but growing minority of trailer dwellers
fighting to improve conditions at more than 100 poorly maintained mobile
home parks that dot the dusty crescent-shaped valley 150 miles
southeast of Los Angeles.

"We didn't want to go all the way to a
lawsuit, but with a situation like this there was no other way. It's a
basic necessity and we were forced to," said Beaza, 51, a hotel
housekeeper, whose trailer was labeled unsafe by the county because of
the power outage. "And the problem that we have is almost nothing
compared to the problems at other places."

Once afraid to speak
out about deplorable living conditions, residents like the Beazas are
taking trailer park owners to court and winning.

A Riverside
County judge who restored the power last week at the Beazas' park
ordered the landlords Thursday to maintain the sewage and electrical
systems and refrain from evicting tenants or raising rent in
retaliation. Residents at two other parks — mostly housing low-income
farmworkers, many of whom who are illegal immigrants — have also sued
and another filed a complaint with the state's Public Utilities
Commission over water rates as high as $595 a month.

The recent
victory marks the first time an entire park has organized itself and
represents a turning point in a decades-long debate about how to address
an affordable housing crisis that has plagued the eastern Coachella
Valley.

"The model is to have the community be the driving force,"
said Sergio Carranza, the executive director of the recently formed
Pueblo Unido Community Development Corp., one of several nonprofits
spurring activism. "We want to give the power to these families."

Wretched
living conditions for migrants predate the arrival of Dust Bowl
refugees in California's fertile fields, but the situation in the
Coachella Valley, known for its table grapes, dates, chili peppers and
other crops, is unique for its severity. Dozens of hidden, illegal
trailer parks pop up faster than regulators can inspect them in the vast
rural county roughly the size of New Jersey.

"It's sort of an
epidemic," said Megan Beaman Carlson, an attorney with California Rural
Assistance League Inc., which is helping residents with lawsuits. "I
think it became too big of an issue for the county to be able to
properly monitor."

At one of the more notorious parks, a
4,000-person rural slum taken over by a federal receiver, wild dogs
roamed muddy alleys, raw sewage overflowed into the streets during heavy
rains and flies swarmed children. Tangled electric wires dangled like
spaghetti, sparking a dangerous fire that left 120 people homeless.

At
the Hernandez Mobile Home Park where the Beazas live, power surges
damaged appliances and occasional septic back-ups spilled human waste
into the mobile homes and into dirt yards.

The brothers who own
the park say they toiled as farmworkers for years themselves and pooled
their money to open their property as a way of helping migrants out.

The
situation grew out of their control as families planted their trailers
for $200 a month, said Oscar Hernandez. Now the brothers are stuck with a
24-trailer site they can't afford, but can't shut down because of the
court order.

"My brothers made this to help people in need. People
came saying 'I don't have a place to stay, I need a place to stay' and
now they're suing us," he said, as his older brother Miguel listened.
"They're trying to make us look like bad people, but everything we have
is here."

In the late 1990s, local officials cracked down on
unpermitted sites, but that just forced residents to flock to nearby
American Indian reservations — where the county had no jurisdiction — or
become homeless. Advocates won a $21 million settlement against the
county for discriminating against low-income Hispanic families by
targeting three dozen sites.

Now, the county is targeting the most
dangerous locations and working with nonprofits to improve conditions
and build affordable housing for the future.

While $59 million was
spent to build 5,200 units of affordable housing and 3,200 more units
are in some stage of development, an estimated 6,000 people are living
in bad conditions, said Emilio Ramirez, the director of the county's
economic development agency.

"It's a dilemma that we face.
Obviously we would like to rid the community of the substandard housing,
but we have to do it in a way that avoids mass homelessness," he said.
"You're kind of stuck between two evils."

That leaves much of the
current battle up to low-wage farmworkers and the landscapers and
housekeepers who commute to nearby Palm Springs and other upscale desert
cities to work at country clubs and luxury resorts.

Residents at
St. Anthony's Mobile Home Park in Mecca successfully sued over
arsenic-tainted well water and now have a fresh supply of water supplied
by a station in front of the trailer park. Sewage stench has been
reduced by pouring lime near evaporation ponds and the lights now work.

Maria
Arredondo, a grape harvester who lived in the park for 17 years before
joining the newly formed "Unity is Strength" committee last year, still
dumps scented cleaning fluid in an evaporating cooler to quell the stink
of the sewage pond a few yards from her front door.

But
tremendous changes recently give her hope that with the help of
nonprofits, they'll one day build a new, 136-unit site nearby with a
grassy space and a community center.

"We have our hopes up and we
don't want to give up on it," she said, grinning. "That's what we're
fighting for and we have to have the faith."